1. Field of the Invention
The invention disclosed broadly relates to location services for handheld wireless devices and more particularly relates to improvements in the accessing of services based on the location or context of the wireless device, and further provides a system and method for providing recommendations on user location(s) and/or preferences.
2. Background Art
Mobile phones and wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) are able to access the Internet using I-Mode protocol, mobile IPv6 protocol or the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). WAP-enabled wireless devices can now access Internet applications such as headline news, exchange rates, sports results, stock quotes, weather forecasts, multilingual phrase dictionaries, personal online calendars, online travel and banking services, or download distinctive ringing tones. Broadband wireless networks make it possible for WAP-enabled wireless devices to exchange multimedia messages that combine conventional text with much richer content types, such as photographs, images, voice clips, and video clips. WAP-enabled wireless devices can be used to pay bills online using the wireless device as a virtual wallet. WAP-enabled wireless devices can deliver useful and informative advertising and transaction services from online merchants. WAP-enabled wireless devices now also provide entertainment services, such as interactive adventure games, quizzes, and chess tournaments.
People tend to travel over the same paths from day to day. They follow their daily routines by going to work, coming back home, putting children to day-care and getting food from a local shop, etc. Using uncommon routes or travelling to places that are not part of the daily routines can be considered as exceptions. More and more, people are carrying handheld wireless devices as they carry on their daily routines, so as to remain in contact with home, work, and on line services. What is needed is a location service for handheld wireless devices, to enable users to create augmented reality services by setting up virtual environment that uses real-world locations. What is needed is a way for a mobile device/phone user to access the augmented reality services by moving inside the service's “real world” location. Another challenge of augmented reality systems is the placement of the augmented data. When using absolute locations for the augmented data, most users won't find some of the augmented data or may find it too easily because of daily routines.
What the prior art needs is a way to personalize the augmented reality services for each user so that the applications will know how novel each location is for the user by using methods and services described in this invention. By personalizing the augmented reality data for each user, it is possible to create an augmented reality that reaches each user in a manner that is more consistent with the spirit and scope of augmented reality systems and services.
Recommendation systems use information of the activity histories or preferences of numerous users to produce useful recommendations for a single user. Existing recommendation systems use collaborative filtering methods to produce recommendations for an individual user by analyzing the actions and preferences of a group of individuals. As the use of information technology has become widespread in all areas of human life, the concerns of individuals over their privacy have increased. Specifically, most distributed recommendation systems were developed for wireline Internet services, and the privacy concerns will significantly increase as the services are adopted for use by more personal, wireless devices.
What is needed is a distributed recommendation system for handheld wireless devices, to enable users to access recommendation services by moving inside the service's real world location. It would further be useful to enable third parties to access information which is a function of the wireless device's location.